The present invention relates to a method for manufacturing loom beams for woven fabrics and an apparatus therefor. Several conventional methods for producing loom beams for woven fabrics by beam warping are known. For example, loom beams are made by beaming a certain number of warper's beams prepared by warping, creel to beam sizing, or beam to beam sizing. These conventional methods may provide efficient productivity in the case of a fabric having a particular (certain) number of ends. However, except for these cases, generally the productivity is considerably decreased, because the maximum capacity of a warping or sizing machine cannot be used due to the restriction of the specification of fabric, that is, the total number of ends.
Furthermore, with the prior art method and apparatus the work stoppage time (idle time of machine) increases as the frequency of changing the warp yarns on creel increases, which is attributed to the change of specifications of fabrics. Also with the prior art method and apparatus the amount of residual short yarns and non-uniform yarns is increased unavoidably, since there remain some yarns on creel not fully used due to the change of the number of yarns wound into beam.
For example, when loom beams for a woven fabric having the total number of ends of 5,600 have to be manufactured in a sizing machine having 1,400 creels, the number of yarns which has to be provided on the creel is 1,400 (that is, 5,600 ends.div.4 warper=1,400 yarns). Accordingly, the capacity of the sizing machine is utilized at 100%.
However, in the case of manufacturing the warp yarns for a fabric having a total number of ends at 5,800, the required number of yarns provided on the creel is 1,161 (that is 5,800 ends.div.5 warpers), thereby causing 240 yarns on the creel to be unused (that is, 1,400 ends-1,160 yarns). This unavoidably causes a 17% decrease in productivity, in view of the fact that only 1,160 yarns among total 1,400 yarns mounted on the creels are utilized.
In the recent trends in manufacturing woven fabrics the kinds of product fabric is more various and the amount of product fabric per lot is smaller. Therefore, it is unavoidable that total ends of fabric are changed frequently. So, there is an unavoidable problem that the residual short yarns are generated in a great quantity, the time of work stoppage comes to be long, and the productivity gets decreased according to the frequent changes of the total ends of fabrics.